Holmes Rolston’s Environmental Aesthetics

1. Holmes Rolston’s Environmental Aesthetics Is All Beauty in Nature? Ugliness Transformed in Ecosystemic Perspective Beyond Beauty to the Sublime Shannon Maylath

2. Overview • Defense of a particular form of aesthetic positivism: a system where not every individual aspect of nature is necessarily positive, but essentially is as a larger whole. • This is in contrast to a more extreme aesthetic positivism, where everything in nature is beautiful precisely because it is natural. • “Telescoping System” where natural phenomena can be considered as Items, Systemic Processes or Scenic Wholes. Proper categorization will be key in understanding a positive aesthetic world picture. • Natural aesthetics is fundamentally different from aesthetics of man-made objects. • Nature cannot fail in the way man-made objects can.

3. Is All Beauty in Nature? • Intuition: “Aesthetic properties ‘call for’ appropriate aesthetic experiences, and it is never ‘called for’ to say that such places are bland, dull, boring, incoherent, chaotic.” • “Wild” • Distinguishes beauty from instrumentality/utility. • Shows the importance of experiencing a landscape on its own terms, sensitive to its integrity. • One sense in which aesthetic properties are always good: • “There can be no failures in nature because nothing is to be judged in the light of aesthetic intention.

4. Cont. • He goes on to acknowledge that apart from the easy answer, there do seem to be instances of failure (negative situations) in nature. These “failures” can be: • Items • Systemic Processes • Scenic Wholes • Death and destruction examples show that there are ugly aspects of nature, but....

5. Ugliness Transformed in Ecosystemic Perspectives • Widen the scope of the natural phenomenon that is being appreciated: • “Every item must be seen not in framed isolation, but framed by its environment, and this frame in turn becomes part of the bigger picture we have to appreciate...” • Characterization of beauty that is most conducive to this sort of appreciation. • Not “Disney World” but a struggling, somber, serious beauty.

6. Cont. • Rolston discusses four ways of understanding or approaching this program for natural aesthetic appreciation: • Appreciating what is not present. • Dead wood, underground, decay, predation • Appreciating what is marred, for the greater whole • Jigsaw puzzle, bitten apple, damaged leaf

7. Cont. • Appreciating nature as part of “something greater” • “Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder,” - Rolston “Beautiful in the Eyes of God,” -Muir • Appreciating natural phenomena in a larger timeline • “Ugliness mellows-though it does not disappear-and makes its contribution to systemic beauty and to beauty in later-coming individuals...”

8. Cont. • So, for Rolston, the end of the individual is never the end of the story. • Itemized ugliness within a systemic process does not subtract from, but enriches the whole. • The ugliness is contained, overcome, and integrates into positive, complex beauty. • “Not so much a matter of sight, as insight into the drama of life”

9. Cont. • So what about ugly systemic processes? i.e. lava flows, tsunami, forest fires • Our understanding of the greater good these events provide may not have caught up to the magnitude of the negativity we associate with these sorts of natural occurences.

10. Beyond Beauty to the Sublime • Aesthetic properties push the beholder to the experiences of the sublime • This reinforces the move Rolston is making from item  systemic process  scenic wholes / the sublime • To Appreciate the sublime aspects of nature: • Be aware of nature’s specific individuality (it is not agriculture, it is not art) • Appreciate it appropriately, allow it to overwhelm (this means immersion, not experience through car window) • Appreciating its enormity and projection (this means considering entire ecosystems, and our place in them)

11. Cont. • A Criticism: People accuse Rolston of having an aesthetic blindfold due to Nature Romanticism • “One stretches and twists ‘beauty’ to fit all the available evidence, some of which would by usual criteria be interpreted as repulsive.” • His Reply: this is not self-centered manipulation of the system, but rather an insistence on context. The goal: • Finding an appropriately inclusive paradigm • Finding a holistic over partial aesthetic view

12. Conclusions • It is not the case that nature is invariably aesthetically positive in immediate detail, but that it is essentially so when even the ugliness is embraced by the sublime. • “As always with trends, one needs not only to evaluate the particulars in space and time, but also to see the system.” • Essential motif: the conquest of constructive over destructive forces, resulting in positive aesthetic experience.